


The Art of Breathing

by Prince_of_Leaves



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 16:45:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3985432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prince_of_Leaves/pseuds/Prince_of_Leaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's laid up in hospital & Sam's sitting vigil, with his sketchpad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Breathing

Sam used to draw. He has a notebook in his lap, and a pen that is reluctant to mar the empty page with wayward doodles. He wonders about skills that grow from fingers, without order and obedience. He learnt techniques at school, but art class could be too confining in its assignments. He saw the world through eyes far older than his classmates, sometimes even wiser than his teachers. So he sketched his life, werewolves and weapons, and on a never ending adventure, there was always something new. He also tried to draw Dean.

Dean was almost impossible to draw. He was never still, in constant motion, fidgeting, twitching, fixing something only could see. He wouldn’t fit in a page, refused to be described by pencil. He was too much, heart spilling all over his freckles, emotions in colours yet unimagined. Sam would watch him intently, trying to understand the nuances of his subject, the sky reflecting of his bruised face, the half-grins when he peeked up from the car bonnet and the white fear of their father.

Dean told him to stop being so creepy. 

He bragged that he was easy enough to draw, and it was true. He had a profile sharp enough to be drawn by any amateur, even eyelashes long enough to be their own feature. Sam didn’t mean it like that though, he didn’t want a street portrait or a police sketch, rather he wanted to define Dean with perfection and precision, with soul, to hold the entirety of Dean on a piece of paper.

He remembered someone once telling him his expectations were unrealistic. 

The old sketchbook is still in the trunk, but it doesn’t have a single sketch of his brother. He would spend hours on a piece, but then rip the page out, sometimes with tears right through the careful lines, scrunch it up, throw it away. A paper trail of brother to leave with the bloody tracks they left in their wake.  
The last time he drew Dean was when he was at school. When he picked up a pencil, it would always somehow revert to the person he couldn’t miss because he was part of him, start with those spikes that Dean always styled, even though he acted nonchalant about it, and end with collar of his leather jacket. He kept those, because he hadn’t kept his brother, but they got destroyed in the fire.

Sam sections his life by the fires. They have burnt up his destiny. 

Dean is only still when he’s asleep on a hospital bed. It’s the best time to draw him, Sam had once thought, but it was wrong to remember him like that, a portrait of the almost dead. He draws spirals on Dean’s arm, hexagons, squares, wants Dean to never ever forget him, to etch a tattoo that says, ‘belongs to Sammy Winchester.’  
Dean does though. Sam’s been subjugated to this chair, so he has earned it.

‘Water?’ Dean croaks, like there are splinters in his throat, eyes vague and unfocused. Sam has an irrational fear that Dean will forget him when he awakens. It happened once, years ago, when Sam didn’t know a world without Dean, and Dean knew one. The drugs had pulled Dean into oblivion so dark and deep, that he woke up asking for mommy, chest hitching until he almost stopped breathing again. He’d stared at Sam, and all Sam had recognised was fear.

Sam holds the glass, while Dean drinks. He looks so sick, it’s unfair. He’s pale, like he hasn’t been in the sun for weeks, and there’s still a blue tint to his skin, which is unnatural. Sam isn’t racist, but he decides he will be against blue skin.

‘Sorry Sammy,’ Dean mumbles. 

‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ Sam growls, ‘you can’t, I forbid you.’

‘Okay,’ Dean says softly, and it unnerves him slightly. Sam knows that when he blows away the cobwebs of static anger and immutable hurt, Dean will give him the world to get   
his forgiveness. There’s nothing he won’t smash and conquer. He’ll probably kill himself, but that won’t matter.

‘Why do your lungs always have to be so much trouble?’ he sighs tiredly, now that Dean’s awake, he wishes he was the one lying comatose, veins full of numbing drugs. 

‘It was after the fire,’ Dean answers, and Sam blinks at him, because he wasn’t expecting an answer, and he didn’t know that, didn’t even know there was a reason, thought it was something random unlucky people were born with, ‘there was too much smoke.’ 

Dean’s scars, the ones etched into his being, the ones he cannot see. 

One day, Sam lost a bet. He had to tidy up the trunk of the Impala, because they’d been throwing all their stuff in, and that wasn’t the way they worked, being almost military. He found one of Dean’s old school satchels, and expecting to find bullet cases or a broken knife, a book he secretly really liked, maybe an assignment he was proud of, many girls’ numbers and definitely something with fungus, he shook it out.

All his abandoned sketches, to kindle a new fire.

~~ 

Dean doesn’t exactly tell the doctor how he got those injuries. Ma’am, I wrenched my shoulder right out of its socket fighting a wendigo and a supernatural being slammed me into a wall with the force of fighter-jet. She’s surprised that he’s casual about a dislocated shoulder, because she doesn’t know it’s happened to him three times already. The pain makes him black out and throw up, and even though he wants to curl himself up into oblivion for days, he’s always back in the Impala hours later. He loves his car, really does, but sometimes, he’d like a home where he can peacefully recover.

A few days later, he’s got a shovel slung over the same shoulder, ignoring the ache, as usual.

So now it’s all caught up with him, the bruised veins spreading right till his spinal cords. She jabs the muscle, because there’s a pinched nerve too, and if he doesn’t want to go for surgery, he’d better stay in bed. 

‘You’re stressed,’ she says, like Dean can switch his life off. Yeah, he is, because everything is his fault, and she can’t change that. Good intentions never rued a man, the way they rue him. 

‘As for your chest,’ she pauses dramatically, and Dean wants her to swear, ‘you’ve got an awful infection. You shouldn’t wait until you’ve stopped breathing to get help.’

‘You should put couches in these rooms,’ he ignores her -doctors are always criticising him, like he deliberately gets ill and needs to be chastised for it- missing Sam already. He told the kid to go and sleep, because he’d been there for hours, but he likes having Sam around him. He rather likes his brother.

Sometimes, there’s a secret rational fear he has, whenever Sam leaves, that he won’t come back. It’s Sam’s coping mechanism, his response when he’s miffed, when he needs some space or if he wants to make Dean fret when their already late. 

Mostly, Dean thinks it’s when he’s a disappointment. He is sorry, but sometimes he wishes Sam would tell him what was wrong, the way dad did, he’s strong, he can take it. It would be preferable to those never-ending resigned sighs, those dark thoughts behind his bangs. Sam will sometimes look at him for the entire drive. It’s like sunburn.

And Dean always gets burnt badly. 

‘Your brother must be a very patient person, to hear you cough endlessly like that,’ she shakes her head, ‘it would make anyone else leave.’

Dean wonders if he can love Sam some more. 

Sam’s there when he wakes up, refreshed enough to smile. Dean hasn’t seen those dimples in years. He pushes Sam’s hair out of his eyes, and Sam swats his hand away. Why would you come back, he wants to ask, when you could find someone who’d make your smiles reach the sun and you wouldn’t remember what it felt like to frown. 

He sits up and coughs, trying to squeeze the words of the doctor out of his mind.

‘Breathe for me, Dean’ Sam says quietly, determinedly, the strength within his voice can control armies. 

‘I’ll try,’ he mumbles, because it’s hard and his chest aches, and sometimes it aches for different sorts of reasons, that inhalers and oxygen can’t fix, and it hurts so desperately. He sounds like a complete loser, but Sam grins, says ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ like he deserves any of it.

‘I’ve got something to show you, officially this time’ Sam’s got a lot of paper in his hands, ‘these are all mine, but their actually all yours. I was going to draw this epic portrait of you and give it you one random day, just because I could.’

He’d picked them up, after Sam threw them away. Some of them were shoddy and some were pretty sharp, but they were all Sam’s, and so were all worth something.

‘Why me?’ he asks, because he doesn’t get it. 

‘You’re kind of mine?’ Sam raises an eyebrow, like it’s an inane question ‘that’s why?’

Dean thinks of endlessness, universes, trillions, infinities and how they all aren’t enough.

**Author's Note:**

> The full story is on my fanfiction.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10710824/1/Forests-Freaks-Flu


End file.
